Various computing methodologies exist or have been proposed for easily tagging or otherwise marking different portions of media streams with metadata. Such methodologies will allow a user to create and associate data (referred to as metadata) to the renderable data of a preexisting media stream. For example, specific text (or other data) may be tagged to a specific portion of a video stream so that, when the stream is played back (i.e., rendered) by a suitable media player, the text is displayed by the media player during the specified portion of the video stream.
Different methodologies have been proposed that generally include creating metadata with the tagging information and then associating the data with the media stream data in some way. The term tagging will be used herein to broadly refer to associating a first set of data (metadata) with media stream data. In one proposed method, a new file containing the media stream's data and the metadata is created so that the media stream data is not edited or changed. In another method, a separate file of metadata is created that is then associated with the media file so that both are utilized upon playback. Other methodologies have also been proposed. Such methodologies are useful in creating close captioned video streams and generally in adding data to be displayed with pre-existing media streams.
Currently, however, user interfaces for such tagging methodologies are still the complicated user interfaces that have been developed for audio and video remixing systems. Because remixing systems typically combine the text or other data to be displayed with the actual data of the media stream to create a combined media stream with little or no metadata.